What actually burns

Vol. I, No. 11 · San Francisco — Monday, July 27, 2026

BY MAXINE DOLAN, CITY DESK

The San Francisco Fire Department keeps a record of every incident it rolls on, and it is a long one: 732,924 of them since 2003, each stamped with what the crew found on arrival. Read a single year of it — 39,160 calls in 2025 — and the first thing the file tells you is that the fire department is not, most days, in the fire business. Something under one call in seven turned out to be a fire at all. Nearly half were false alarms. The rest were the miscellany a city dials when it does not know who else to phone: a person down, a wire on the sidewalk, a smell of gas, a door that has to be forced.

When there was a fire, the file is just as blunt about what it was. The department logged 5,524 of them in 2025. Of those, 3,537 — better than three in five — were outside rubbish: a trash can, a dumpster, a heap at the curb, a mattress on a corner. Building fires, the kind the word conjures, numbered 248. Set the two side by side and the city’s fire is fourteen times likelier to be garbage than a house. It was not always so. In 2005 the department fought 612 rubbish fires and 518 building fires — near even money. Since then the rubbish fire has nearly sextupled while the building fire has been cut in half, and most of the divergence arrived after 2019.

Where the trash burns is no mystery: the Mission logged the most in 2025, then Bayview–Hunters Point, South of Market, the Tenderloin — the blocks where the street is most lived on. What the number cannot tell you by itself is why each one lit, and this desk will not have the file say “encampment” when it says “trash.” The department does keep a separate code for a tent or encampment fire; it logged 51 of those last year, down from a 2022 peak, even as ordinary rubbish fires stayed high. The honest read is narrower than the loud one: the volume of small outdoor fire in San Francisco has moved with the condition of its streets, and it has more than doubled since 2019. Confidence on the counts is high; on the causes, this is a read, and offered as one.

Now turn the file over and look at the false alarms, because they hide a small extinction. San Francisco still bolts red fire-alarm boxes to its poles — the Gamewell street boxes, a nineteenth-century idea the city has never quite retired. For a century, pulling one was how you turned in a fire, and pulling one for sport was how a certain kind of afternoon got its excitement. In 2010 those boxes cried wolf 5,156 times. In 2025 they did it 156 times — a 97 percent collapse, the malicious corner-box pull all but a dead art. And yet the department answered more false alarms last year than in 2010, not fewer: 17,963 against 13,918. The false alarm did not leave. It moved indoors, and up. The hand on the corner box became a smoke detector with a low battery, an alarm panel in a fault, a system that sounds because a contractor sanded a wall — automatic false alarms up better than eighty percent across the same years. The prank became a malfunction.

For all that, the file ends where it should, on the thing that matters. Five San Franciscans died in fires in 2025. Every one of those deaths was in one of the 248 building fires — the rarest fire on the list, six-tenths of one percent of the year’s calls. The 3,537 rubbish fires, the ones the city sees and smells and photographs, killed no one. That is the whole shape of it in a sentence: the common fire is loud and the rare fire is lethal, and the two have been trading places for twenty years. A department that once mostly fought buildings now mostly answers alarms that aren’t and hoses down trash that is, and saves its danger for the few hundred nights a year when a building actually goes.

There are, I have always held, three stories in this city — land, water, and who signs the permits — and everything else is weather. This, then, is the weather, finally written down: what catches, where, and how often. It says the town is less flammable than it was and more combustible on its sidewalks; that the old alarm went quiet and a new one took its place; that the fire worth fearing is the one you almost never see. Nine times in ten the bell rings for nothing. The tenth time, count the trash cans. The rare time after that, count the exits.

San Franciscans called 311 to complain about parking 160,556 times last year — a number that looks like it doubled since 2019 and, read honestly, didn’t. What it did do is climb, and what it climbs over is driveways.

BY INES CALLOWAY, TRANSIT DESK — ABOARD THE 49, ON MISSION

From the front of a 49 stalled behind a car in the bus zone, you would guess San Franciscans have never been angrier about parking, and the 311 log agrees — up to a point. The city fielded 160,556 parking-enforcement requests in 2025, each one a resident asking the government to come ticket or tow somebody. Set that against 2019’s 78,142 and it reads like a doubling. It isn’t, quite, and the gap between those two facts is a lesson in reading a public file before you quote it.

Somewhere between then and now the city folded its old “abandoned vehicle” complaint — 30,127 of them in 2019 — into the parking-enforcement bucket as a subtype. Add that category back to both years and the honest comparison is 108,269 in 2019 against 160,556 in 2025: a rise of 48 percent, not 105. Still a real climb, and a steepening one — it grew by a quarter in the last year alone. Half of the requests now come in by phone app, which means some of the increase is simply how easy the city has made complaining. That caveat is owed, and paid.

What survives the correction is the texture, and the texture is driveways. The single largest thing San Franciscans reported in 2025 was a car blocking a driveway — 53,185 times, counting the ones that asked for a tow. Second was plain illegal parking, 48,881. Third, a car up on the sidewalk, 33,608. Those three — driveway, curb, sidewalk — are 84 percent of it, and not one of them is a meter or a permit. They are the complaints of people who cannot get their own car out, or their own stroller past, phoning a city to referee a few feet of concrete.

The geography runs where you would expect two different cities to meet the same problem: heaviest in the Mission and South of Market, where the cars outnumber the curb, and high again in the Outer Sunset and Outer Richmond, where nearly every house has a garage and therefore a driveway to block. Read it as this desk does and it is less a crime wave than a density gauge — a city reporting on itself, block by block, over the oldest scarce resource it has: somewhere to put the car. The count is exact; how much of the rise is more violations and how much is a better app, the file will not split, and honesty says it is some of each. Confidence high on the number, moderate on the verdict. From aboard the 49, the read is simpler. The driveway is the new frontier, and everyone’s is blocked.

BY MEL ADLER, COMMERCE DESK

The file is called Restaurant Scores, and it is a tidy one: 53,973 inspections of 6,253 San Francisco eating places, each with a date and a number out of a hundred. It is also a dead one. Its last entry is dated November 28, 2019 — the day before Thanksgiving, six and a half years gone — and nothing has been added since. For three years the Department of Public Health fed the open record dutifully, sixteen to eighteen thousand inspections a year, and then the feed simply went quiet, the way a restaurant’s phone does before anyone announces it has closed. A search of the city’s open-data catalog turns up no successor; the other “restaurant inspection” files it offers belong to New York and Calgary. The inspectors did not stop, to be clear — the health department still visits, still scores, still hangs the color-coded placard in the window and posts the individual result to its own lookup page. What ended was the ledger: the one downloadable record in which anyone could put the useful question — which kitchens fail, how often, and under which owners — and get it answered by the thousand instead of one storefront at a time. This desk keeps obituaries for businesses; here is one for a dataset. It is survived by 6,253 scores frozen at the last supper before the pandemic, and by a placard in every window that you must now go and read in person, the way our grandparents did. Confidence is total that the feed stopped; why it was never revived is the open question, and a fair one to put to the department. The city still knows which kitchens fail. It has only stopped telling us in a form we can count.